Archive for April, 2006
If you plant Ice (Harvest) you’re gonna get… well, a pile o’crap
Posted by frothy in Ice Harvest (2005) on April 26, 2006
I finally plopped on down in the recliner to watch The Ice Harvest, which was billed as a caper/comedy thriller starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton as two guys trying to rip off the Mob. The movie was directed by comedy auteur Harold Ramis and was cowritten by Robert Benton (who wrote and/or directed such gems as Superman, The Late Show, and Nobody’s Fool).
So there was a pedigree at work here. A certain expecation, if you will. Only it didn’t pan out. Sure, those guys were in it, and that guy directed it, and that other guy wrote it. That much is true. But the result was pretty awful.
Cusack, whom I like in almost everything, ever, ever, plays Charlie, a crooked lawyer. Thornton plays a strip-club owner. They team up to rip off Charlie’s boss and plan to leave Wichita Falls as soon as planes can take off (it’s icy and rainy out). You know how it is, they just gotta lay low for a few hours, act “normal,” and then they’re home free, but they can’t, so they’re not.
The characters suck. Cusack is never a good guy. I mean, sometimes you see characters who are generally nice guys who do bad things, like kill a guy in self defense, or maybe cheating on his wife. But Charlie’s actions and motives in this movie weren’t exactly pristine – and, what’s worse, they also weren’t ambiguous. He was a jackass and a creep. Tough to root for a guy like that.
The plot is hopelessly contrived – let’s see how much trouble Charlie can get into! Let’s use a running gag of a local cop pulling him over and recognizing him, and letting him go if Charlie can remember the cop’s name! Let’s have an extended sequence where Charlie tries to chaperone the drunken husband of his ex-wife, who is of course a close friend, back home. The friend’s played by Oliver Platt, who brings the only excitement and interest to the movie.
All in all, a real shame. With the people involved, this should have been much, much better.
264 – Domino
Domino Harvey was a high-fashion model (not necessarily a high fashion model) who was bored with life and decided to be a kick-butt bounty hunter, partly to get away from a domineering mother and to escape the long shadow of her father, the late actor Laurence Harvey.
Domino (Keira Knightley) tells her story in a flashback to an inquiring FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu). Domino’s been captured by the Feds in a bounty hunt gone terribly awry. Cooly smoking a cigarette, with blood dripping from her nose and mouth, Domino decides to answer all of the shrink’s questions. Time for full disclosure.
Domino explains how she got bored with hanging around her pool in Beverly Hills, how she detested the “perfect” culture in southern California (especially the show Beverly Hills 90210), and how she especially hated joining a tony sorority. No, the life of the privileged wasn’t one for Domino. So she became a bounty hunter.
The two other members of her team are Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), two mean-looking, tough-acting hombres who can and do shoot and kill as easily as you or I might butter a slice of bread. But they – and Domino – manage somehow to get the job done, jobs funneled to them by bail bondsman Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo). But then one of Claremont’s mistresses’ granddaughter is dying, and she needs a superexpensive operation, so Claremont hatches some kind of scheme to rob an armored car and then return the money minus a finder’s fee.
Which is briefly why Domino finds herself in an interrogation room with Lucy Liu. Lucy Liu with her calm demeanor that’s meant to get under your skin. It seems that Domino’s future is at least partly up to this psychologist, but the scenes are really just a device to relate Domino’s experiences to the viewer.
Knightley seems an odd casting choice, but it’s a fair assumption that the real Domino Harvey had a similar body build. Knightley is tall with big, dark eyes, and she sure isn’t muscular, about what you’d expect a fashion model to look like. (I think she goes a tad overboard with the eye makeup, but what do I know?)
The film moves along at a frantic pace, with scenes sometimes a little out of chronological sequence, the better to distract the viewer from a rather straightforward plot. The producers threw in a made-up subplot involving counterfeit DMV identifications to spice thing up a bit (tying it with the armored-car plot, too). So there are double crosses and setups and all manner of untrustworthy behavior.
In the end, though, I didn’t learn a heck of a lot about Domino other than the more superficial of descriptions. If the title character had not been a true-life person (the real Domino died in 2005), the movie would have felt pedestrian, even mundane. Domino Harvey surely led a fascinating life, and we do get a glimpse into it, but it’s only a brief glimpse that focuses on one, career-ending caper (or is it?), making the movie much more sound and fury than one that concentrates on character and plot development.
I know, I know, Shakespeare it’s not supposed to be. But I didn’t want it to be – I wanted panache, verve, and sizzle, and I got one dimensionality and fizzle. Here’s a question for you. Sure, Domino is good at nunchucks, and we do get to see her use them once. But that’s about it. She doesn’t typically use a gun, and she’s not strong enough to beat a bounty into submission. So what’s her big talent that makes her such a viable part of the team?
Oh, that’s right. Sex appeal. In one memorable early scene, she offers a lapdance to bad guys in order to get information. Sure, that’d happen in real life. You have ten guns aimed at her, and you’re going to give her information for a lapdance that you can get anyway at the local strip club? Okay.
So, bottom line – Knightley’s cute, but she doesn’t quite have the screen presence to sufficiently dominate (pardon the pun) the movie; at no point was I really convinced she could kick my ass. Which would make her a pretty poor bounty hunter indeed.
Domino: **1/2
Top movies you should see (but may not have heard of)
Posted this on my regular journal earlier, before this one existed.
[This includes the scariest movie I've ever seen. See if you can pick it out.]
In ascending chronological order:
M
The Old, Dark House
You Can’t Take It with You
The Ox-Bow Incident
I Walked with a Zombie
The Uninvited
Dead of Night
The Razor’s Edge
Green for Danger
Odd Man Out
D.O.A.
The Narrow Margin
Bad Day at Black Rock
Kiss Me Deadly
Tunes of Glory
One, Two, Three
Seven Days in May
Seconds
Marat/Sade
The President’s Analyst
Targets
Countdown
The Reivers
Straw Dogs
Sleuth
The Wicker Man
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
The Sugarland Express
Night Moves
The Big Red One
The Day After
Special Bulletin
Insignificance
A Midnight Clear
One False Move
Heavenly Creatures
Floudering
Shallow Grave
The Addiction
Happiness
Limbo
The Man Who Wasn’t There
In the Bedroom
Igby Goes Down
One Hour Photo
Roger Ebert’s 101 Movies You Gotta See
… in order to have, he says, an informed discussion.
In other words, not The Greatest, not the Most Influencial, but the ones you assume everyone else has seen. Ebert sez here that movies are basically our cultural currency; if two people have seen The Godfather, then they have something that relates them.
Anyway, he provides a list of 101 Movies. How many have you seen? How many have you never heard of? (The latter should be a tiny number, given the criteria.)
I’ve seen 78. Some of the ones I haven’t seen are on The List.
263 – Fun with Dick and Jane
Posted by frothy in Fun with Dick and Jane on April 18, 2006
Fun with Dick and Jane, a remake of a 1977 comedy starring George Segal and Jane Fonda and whose title comes from a popular children’s book of the time, is uneven and underwhelming, although it does feature some amusing performances by the current leads, Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni.
Dick (Carrey) is excited because he’s finally gotten a huge promotion at the gigantic conglomerate at which he works, so he encourages wife Jane (Leoni) to quit her job as a travel agent. And then the big company is sunk by unethical behavior on the part of its CEO (Alec Baldwin), and suddenly the Harpers are without jobs, money, or prospects. Desperate, Dick decides to turn to a life of crime – and, as it turns out, they’re pretty good at it!
When the duo runs into the former financial officer of Dick’s old company (Richard Jenkins) they decide to try to get back the money that the CEO had swiped (i.e., the pensions of all of the lower-level employees). A scheme is hatched, and madcap hilarity ensues.
About 45 minutes elapse before the Harpers begin to rob businesses, which is about 35 minutes too long, in my opinion. I mean, the premise of the movie is that they have to become criminals in order to survive, so why waste half the film leading up to it? On the other hand, maybe there’s only so much one can watch of the Harpers robbing Starbucks and head shops before one’s head explodes.
The laughs are generally scattershot. Carrey comes off best, because he’s always excelled in playing manic, exuberantly broad characters. He’s well cast, and so is Leoni as his equally flighty-funny wife. Because the actors are such good fits for the roles, the movie’s not altogether unentertaining; they do much more for the movie than it does for them. Adding able support is Baldwin as the heavy and Jenkins as the disgraced CFO, now a lush. An interesting running gag has the Harpers’ son speaking with a Spanish accent (and occasionally in Spanish), thanks largely to his being raised by their Spanish-speaking nanny.
Dick and Jane is amiable enough, but it’s not as consistently funny as it should have been.
Fun with Dick and Jane: **1/2
The Boys from Brazil
Posted by frothy in Boys from Brazil (1978) on April 13, 2006
Maybe the best part about this 1978 movie is that you get to see Gregory Peck as an evil Nazi, Dr. Joseph Mengele. No, wait, the best part is that you get to see Sir Laurence Olivier as an aging Jewish hunter of Nazis, modeled after Simon Weisenthal.
Apparently some muckity-mucks in the Nazi party have gathered in Paraguay, where Mengele reveals a sinister plan. Well, only part of the plan, really – he instructs his minions to kill 97 old men, all age 65, on specific days over a two-year period. Why? Luckily for us, Steve Guttenberg is eavesdropping, and through him Olivier as Ezra Lieberman investigates.
Olivier really stands out here, but who could expect less? He didn’t go all Orson Welles on everyone and ham up every latter-day role he had. I mean, could you ever see Sir Larry doing the voice of a Transformer? Naw.
262 – Thank You for Smoking
Posted by frothy in Thank You for Smoking on April 13, 2006
If you were head of an ethically challenged industry, you’d want Nick Naylor on your side, lobbying the holy crap out of everyone. Nick would have you believing your lung cancer has nothing to do with the industry he represents, Big Tobacco, and that the real issue here is the freedom of adults across America to choose what they want to choose, and isn’t that worth fighting for?
Nick (Aaron Eckhart) is so slick, he’s able to accuse an antismoking advocate of hoping that lung-cancer patients die, because if they lived then he (the advocate) would see his budget slashed. Then he tells a shocked studio audience that his organization is launching a $50 million campaign to discourage kids from smoking. Slick and effective!
When not spinning, spinning, and spinning, Nick commiserates with fellow spokespersons for industries of ill repute: Polly (Maria Bello), the liquor companies; and Bobby Jay (David Koechner), the gun companies. Together, they are…… the MOD Squad, wherein MOD stands for Merchants of Death. A little gallows humor is necessary when you peddle mortality.
Anyway, the idea is that Nick must spin Smoking Is Good, from deriding “questionable” scientific studies that disagree with his premise to lobbying Hollywood for more product placement (that is, no more would cigarettes be held in movies only by Bad Guys or Europeans – the heros would get them, too). Oh, and pay off the Marlboro Man (Sam Elliott), who’s bitterly dying of cancer. And deal with a duplicitous boss (J. K. Simmons, who plays J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man films). And be spirited about by the Head Honcho of Big Tabacka, The Captain (Robert Duvall).
It’s a lot for poor ol’ Nick, but that’s not all – he has to be a role model of sorts to his young son, who dotes upon him while living with his mom (and her boyfriend) in Nick’s house, while Nick gets an apartment.
But don’t feel too bad for Nick, since he gets to shag nearly every female in the story. But not in the movie, since it’s not a movie of infinite length. But then I’m comparing the movie to the book by Christopher Buckley, and that’s not entirely fair.
The problem with the movie is that its wit, so wicked and sharp in the book, has been dulled a bit; it feels Hollywoodized, as if everything has to be Just So. As if it’s okay to point and laugh at the absurdity of pimping for cigarettes from a distance, but not to get in close and snark at the details.
The story also suffers from a shifted focus. In the book, Nick’s relationship with his son was one of the lesser threads, but in the movie it’s at the forefront. My guess is that the makers (including the director and writer, Jason Reitman) figured this would make the movie a better sell across various demographics. This is what happens when a plot gets Hollywoodized – it tries to appeal to too many people. Kind of odd for a movie that wasn’t supposed to be a blockbuster, anyway.
On the bright side, the casting is spot on, particularly Eckhart, who is aces in roles of dubious morality. Sure, he’s an insufferable, randy cad, but he’s not a nasty jerk, so we kind of root for him but deplore his intentions.
Just about everyone else is a secondary character, except for Nick’s son, Joey (Cameron Bright), and thankfully the young actor wasn’t melodramatic or maudlin or hammy, or any of a number of thespianic maladies that affect novices. Point of fact, he was quite charming and convincing.
Not so convincing was the often-miscast Mrs. Tom Cruise. How is it the Katie Holmes keeps getting grownup roles when she looks like she’s about two years late for her high school reunion? (Side note: Holmes’ character, a reporter, is described in the book and the movie as having nice breasts. This wasn’t weird to see in the book, but it made no sense in the movie, as Holmes herself is, uh, lacking.)
The bottom line is that Thank You misses the mark just a tad by way of a shift in plot focus and a dulling of sharp satire.
Thank You for Smoking: **1/2
Randoms and drive-ins
Caught Across 110th Street, Rush Hour, and The Rescuers over the weekend. (I know, I am so exciting.)
Across is pretty gritty and gives a realistic (I suppose) look at crime in the big city circa 1972. It has to do with a white cop (Anthony Quinn) teamed up with a black cop (Yaphet Kotto) to find the guys who knocked over a bank run by the Mob. But it’s not a buddy pic – Quinn’s losing his job and prestige to the younger Kotto. It’s a pretty violent film. Guys get shot, tortured, etc. So it was right up my alley. Across 110th Street is now long forgotten, but many of today’s cop movies and TV shows owe something to its realism.
Rush Hour, of course, most people have heard of; this is the 1998 movie with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan as mismatched buddy cops. Seems the daughter of the consulate has been kidnapped, and Jackie’s on the case. Only the FBI doesn’t want him on the case, so they assign Tucker to watch his ass. Doesn’t quite work. Guys get shot AND punched. Madcap fun ensues. Tucker, who can be annoying, is really hilarious here – it was really a breakout role for him.
The Rescuers was the last full-length Disney animated film by the original seven old Disney animators. It’s been largely overlooked in the ensuing decades, and that’s a real shame – it’s GORGEOUSLY animated; you can see each detailed raindrop as Bianca and Bernard walk through the zoo, for example. Sure, it’s a little derivative – Madame Medusa looks like Cruella de Vil, not coincidentally – but it’s a heartwrenching, funny story. When people think of Disney’s heydays, they think of the 1940s and the resurgence in the 1990s, not the 1970s, but this little gem could stand some rediscovery.
Which brings me to the bit about the drive in theaters. There are hardly any, anywhere in the US now, because theater owners found that indoor ones were more profitable – you could house 16 screens under one roof, but you can’t do that with a drive in. Where would everyone park? And the screens couldn’t be too close to one another, because they’d drown each other out. Still, I miss ‘em a little. They were almost all the same. Refreshment stand at the back. Rows and rows of poles with speakers attached (you’d put the speaker on your car window). And finally, a playground right up by the screen. Parents would drag their kids there and let them play on the swingsets in their jammies until they got tired, then they’d all huddle in the car and watch the requiste cartoon before the feature. By then, the kidlets would be asleep, and the parents could watch the meatier feature presentation in peace. At least in theory. I think I saw The Rescuers when it came out, in a drive in, but I can’t remember for sure. I did see The Love Bug during a rerelease (which is another thing they often did with movies back then, since there was no DVD or home video). In a now-famous bit of family lore, I apparently shouted at Herbie to “watch out.” Thirty years later, and they still remember that. Anyone here ever go to a drive in? What was your experience? How long ago was it? I last visited a drive in theater in 1996, when I visited Hawaii. Got to see a double feature of Sabrina and Cutthroat Island.
261 – March of the Penguins
Posted by frothy in March of the Penguins on April 7, 2006
A charming tale of natural survival in Antarctica, March of the Penguins is about the yearly journey of Emperor penguins from their home to their breeding grounds, over frozen ground that leaves them an easy mark for predators and the elements. The vivid photography of this documentary evokes an always-harsh climate, so dangerous that many of the birds don’t survive the trek.
How the penguins navigate from point A to point B is still quite the mystery, as the winds and water can alter the terrain so that it appears to be completely different than it had the previous year. The penguins march, mostly single file, and when they’re too tired to walk, they propel themselves on their aerodynamic bellies. When they get to their vaunted breeding ground, the males seek out females – and trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed two penguins courting each other. They all look alike, even to each other, you see, so they must seek out their mates by making mating calls. The female is somehow attracted to a particular call, and she hooks up with the male. Thankfully, we’re denied a visual of this last action.
After mating, the penguins huddle for warmth, waiting for the female to lay an egg. Penguins don’t lie down, normally; they stand. After laying the egg, the female shuffles over to the male with the egg between her feet and nudges it over to the male, taking care not to let the egg touch the cold ground or be exposed to the turbulent air.
Then the female makes her second long journey – this time to feed herself and bring back food for the young’un. While she’s gone, the male babysits. Neither daddy nor baby have any food at all during this time, which can span three months. The females find their food and come back to feed their offspring, while the male undertakes his own second long journey.
The culmination of all of this walking and waiting is that ultimately the hatchlings are left to fend for themselves. Mama Penguin leaves first, then a bit later Papa Penguin goes another way. The babies look at each other and then go off on their own as well, heading toward the ocean, which by this point is much closer (i.e., the ice and snow has melted), and take their first plunge into the deep.
March is wonderfully photographed, especially considering how close up and personal the viewer can get to the birds. My goodness, these are real penguins, not autoanimatronic creations of some wacky Imagineer! If these penguins had facial expressions, you’d have seen those, too. The intimacy works very well, especially during the egg transference, detailing the ritual quite nicely.
Another major plus is the stentorial narration by Morgan Freeman, who lends plenty of gravitas to a film that didn’t really need it to begin with. The result is an Oscar winner for Best Documentary feature.
March of the Penguins: ***1/2
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